Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> Perl was created by an SA.
Larry is a man of many hats. Pidgeonholing him into the most
politically correct Tribe of Israel isn't going to push
Perl advocacy forward.
> I am a SA, not a programmer.
> USENIX and SAGE have been and continue to be one of the longest running
> supporters of Perl.
> I am not a programmer.
> and no, I am not a programmer.
I knew I could count on you to reinforce my point. :-)
Focusing on selling books on Perl+CGI, Perl+DBI, modperl, OOPerl,
Perl/TK and other programmerly things is missing the mark by
a great deal. Many people who use perl are like Elaine - they don't
identify as being Perl *programmers*, yet they use Perl and occasionally
promote it most vigorously.
And, no, I don't think adding 5 "Perl for System Administration" titles
into a mix of dozens of Perl books is the silver bullet cure.
> I am not "Dark Matter" either.
That was not an insult. If you felt insulted, you can take it up
with me privately.
All of the talk about positioning Perl to programmers really is
missing the mark - sysadmins and casual users who use Perl. Call
them the silent majority, the invisible majority, the thousand points
of light, dark matter or whatever you want. The point remains that
a programmer-centric focus of Perl is ignoring the majority
of the user base, inadvertantly or otherwise.
I have met many people who do not classify themselves as Perl users
even though we would. These people are being lost because a lot of
effort is spent making the Perl programming language appear like it
is for, well, programmers.
Sysadmins identify with Perl, but they are but one of the non-programmer
communities out there that use Perl. They are perhaps the largest
and most easily targeted community of non-programmers out there,
but there are more.
> SAs have been using Perl daily for the last 12 years...we don't need to
> be evangelised or convinced.
I've met sysadmins in Perl shops who have had Perl pegged to the
top of their to-do lists for years and haven't gotten past Learning Perl
yet. I don't think Perl has hit 100% saturation within the sysadmin
community, especially when WinNT admins are added into the mix.
And then there's EMC. If someone is paying sysadmins to use sh and
awk and actively discourages Perl, someone in that area needs to be
convinced. Or am I misinterpreting your posts here?
Apparently, there is still a need to market Perl to sysadmins, and
perhaps their managers.
Z.
